Bridging Fluid Borders

Entanglements in the French-Brazilian Borderland

Fabio Santos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000531800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialtheorie

Interweaving rich ethnographic descriptions with an innovative theoretical approach, this book explores and unsettles conventional maps and understandings of Europe and the Americas. Through an examination of the recently inaugurated cross-border bridge between France's overseas department of French Guiana and Brazil's northern state of Amapá, which effectively acts as a one-way street and serves to perpetuate inequalities in a historically deeply entangled region, it foregrounds the ways in which borderland inhabitants such asindigenous women, illegalised migrants, and local politicians deal with these inequalities and the increasingly closed Amazonian border in everyday life. A study that challenges the coloniality of memory, this volume shows how the borderland along and across the Oyapock River, far from being the hinterland of France and Brazil, in fact illuminates entangled histories and their concomitant inequalities on a large scale. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and border studies with interests in postcolonialism, memory, and inequality.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193555-2

The French-Brazilian borderland is a space of inextricable entanglements that have crisscrossed and overlapped throughout history. Today, the threads of these entanglements continue to ravel and intersect in complex ways. For many social scientists and scholars in the humanities, it may come as a surprise that France— by way of its so-called overseas department, French Guiana—shares its longest terrestrial border with the Brazilian state of Amapá. Extending 730 kilometres on the north-eastern edge of the Amazon rainforest, this rarely studied border is a fully fledged external border of France and the European Union (EU). About half of the border is formed by the Oyapock River: after running through tropical rainforest and passing a number of indigenous and riverine communities as well as the two border towns of Saint-Georges and Oiapoque—today (dis)connected by the Oyapock River Bridge—the river flows into the Atlantic Ocean. This border between the Brazilian state of Amapá and French Guiana, a so-called outermost region of the EU, poses a variety of challenges for academics trying to maintain clear-cut geographical divisions and theoretical concepts.¹ As the only outermost region located on a continental landmass rather than an island, French Guiana and its borders with Brazil (to the southeast) and Suriname (to the west) trouble prevalent understandings of geographical referents (Europe and South America) and notions such as sovereignty, modernity, citizenship, the nation-state, and even that of the border itself. Sociological at its core and in dialogue with anthropology, history, geography, and archaeology, this book seeks to rework some of our common concepts and maps, and it brings together several critical theories illuminating ways to interpret shifting spaces and inequalities at the interstices of local and global entanglements.

Along the way, rich ethnographic insights from the borderland are given, and a variety of hitherto disregarded actors come to the fore. Indigenous women, international migrants, members of riverine communities (ribeirinhos), and many others have shaped the dialogic research process on which this monograph is based. I address the question of how these groups deal with the border in everyday life. How and for which reasons do they cross the border? Turning the question upside down, we can also scrutinise to what extent the border crosses the inhabitants of the borderland. In which ways do they negotiate cross-border mobility under conditions of ‘remoteness,’ intersecting inequalities, and restrictive mobility rights? In tackling such questions ethnographically, my study aims at offering innovative insights for the overlapping and interdisciplinary fields of border studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies as well as global sociologies and ethnographies of space, inequality, and migration. In particular, I draw upon and feed into a vibrant new field of research interested in the coloniality of memory, which actively renders Europe’s overseas territories and borders unthinkable. Accordingly, any further academic, political, and media visibility of these territories requires a (usually undesired) engagement with Europe’s colonial past and its ongoing colonial ties. ‘If claiming that the westernmost point of the European Union lies in the Caribbean or that France borders Brazil seems spectacular or extreme,’ sociologist Manuela Boatcă (2019: 109) writes, ‘this only goes to show the extent to which the coloniality of memory is ingrained in the public perception of Europe.’ As an empirically grounded critique of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism, then, my enquiry joins current endeavours in establishing ‘Outermost Europe,’ ‘Overseas Europe,’ ‘Europe Otherwise’ or ‘European Elsewheres’ as an innovative field of study (Adler-Nissen and Gad 2013; Boatcă 2018, 2019, 2021; Bonilla 2015; Connell and Aldrich 2020; Santos 2017; Boatcă and Santos 2022). In doing so, it also builds upon the critical research conducted primarily in French academia on the persistent inequality and invisibility of Guyane—the official denomination in French, employed in this book interchangeably with French Guiana—and the other overseas territories of France (Benoît 2020; Collomb and Mam Lam Fouck 2016; Collomb et al. 2020; Lemercier et al. 2014; Trépied and Guyon 2013; Wood and MacLeod 2018a). By also including the Brazilian state of Amapá, this book illuminates a blind spot called the French-Brazilian borderland. As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that the pending autonomy of territories like French Guiana is in itself a legacy of our shared yet historiographically divided histories, borrowing a concept coined by anthropologist Shalini Randeria (1999a; Conrad and Randeria 2013 [2002]). Simply put, the social sciences should no longer turn a blind eye to Europe’s colonial remains spread out across the world.

The borderland at the margins of Brazil’s northern state of Amapá and of France’s département d’outre-mer of Guyane is home to a variety of unequal entanglements that bind the populations on both sides of the border together while also tearing them apart. In this monograph, I explore these tensions further by means of a rigorous historical contextualisation of inequalities and spatial transformations as well as through ethnographic insights that illuminate current forms of socio-spatial connections and separations. At the border between Brazil and France, the entanglements are considerably more complex and invisibilised than in other border configurations. This borderland, I claim, deserves particular social scientific attention due to its unparalleled meeting point in South America between a Mercosur member that is conventionally classified as part of the Global South and a territorial outpost of France and the European Union, usually categorised as part of the Global North. Not only is decolonisation still pending in Guyane, but also the territory has actually been turned into an extension, or even laboratory, of ‘Fortress Europe’ with a number of legal provisions set up to prevent mobilities and illegalise people of different nationalities and ‘stateless natives.’ With this term, anthropologist Catherine Benoît (2015, 2018, 2020) describes Amerindians and Maroons born on French soil who are turned into undocumented migrants in the absence of administrative facilities documenting their place of birth in forlorn parts of the French Republic.

During my fieldwork, I was often overwhelmed by the numerous entanglements of this forgotten borderland that encompasses Brazil’s northernmost city of Oiapoque and Saint-Georges in southern French Guiana. How could I ever unravel these interwoven stories? I decided to embark on an ethnographic journey, taking part in everyday life and talking to catraieiros (pirogue drivers), politicians, gold miners, health professionals, police officers, teachers, schoolchildren, academics, people on the move, and many others. Living in the multilingual borderland and spending time with people who were willing to share bits and pieces of their lives, I could identify recurring patterns of social and spatial exclusion. When regarded within their respective national contexts, Saint-Georges and Oiapoque are home to a disproportionately high number of poor people who receive state allowances such as Bolsa Família (Brazil) and Caf (France). The Caf payment always falls on the fifth of each month, and on that day, you can be certain to encounter hundreds of people lining up in front of Saint-Georges’ only cash machine. Even though the populations on both sides face striking inequalities, Brazilians and other non-EU citizens living in Oiapoque are notably more excluded, lacking access to fundamental resources such as running (not to mention clean) water, quality healthcare, and education, which in turn triggers their attempts at cross-border movements and activities. Yet, physical mobility across the French-Brazilian border is subject to restrictive jurisdiction—at least for those wishing to enter French Guiana. While French citizens are entitled to enter Brazilian territory for a period of up to 90 days, Brazilians and many other non-EU citizens have to undergo the complicated, costly, and oftentimes fruitless endeavour of applying for a visa. Even though Brazilians do not need a visa to travel to other parts of France, they need one to enter their neighbouring French territory. Selectivity on the basis of citizenship, residence permits, and visa policies, thus, has shown to be a constant reminder of a citizenship and visa regime that perpetuates global inequalities in terms of social and geographical mobility opportunities (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009; Shachar 2009). At the same time, citizenship complexly interacts with other ascriptive criteria such as gender, race, and class, thereby rendering the analysis of global inequalities both more complex and accurate (Boatcă 2015; Boatcă and Roth 2016; Costa 2011; Jelin et al. 2018). On the basis of historically contextualised ethnographic data, this book seeks to provide evidence of these intersections in a colonially shaped, little-known borderland. I argue that contrary to prevalent depictions of a remote borderland detached from the inequalities ensuing the capitalist world economy, the French-Brazilian borderland reflects and magnifies global inequalities.

Based on close conversations with a multitude of people with differently situated positionings and by reference to spatial sociology, intersectionality, theories of interdependent inequalities, postcolonial and decolonial approaches, as well as feminist and critical border geographies, the present study deals with global inequalities and local manifestations in the French-Brazilian borderland, with a focus on the historically constituted socio-spatial dimension. While my intention is to detail the complexities observed during fieldwork, this exploration makes no claim to be exhaustive. Rather than providing a ‘complete’ picture of the borderland, the contribution of this research is to offer an in-depth account of a handful of ethnographic ‘stories-so-far’ (Massey 2005: 9) in combination with sociological theorisations on space and inequality. Yet, before delving deeper into the core of this ethnography, it is necessary to make some terminological clarifications and to briefly map a field which is usually off the map.

Mapping the field

The French-Brazilian borderland is at the crossroads of different cultural, political, and geographical contexts. As Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod (2018b: 3) put it, Guyane is ‘a territory which in geographical terms is at the juncture of the Caribbean and Amazonia but, in political and administrative terms, is French and, indeed, European.’ However, this complex setting—and the French-Brazilian border in particular—usually goes unnoticed in discussions about the interdependencies between France and Brazil as well as between Europe and South America. This is especially surprising when considering that the French-Brazilian border is the longest terrestrial border that France shares with another country. To the west, French Guiana borders Suriname, an independent state that was a Dutch colony until 1975. Within this geographical context—also known as the Guiana shield, comprising French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, most of Venezuela, small fractions of Colombia, and the northern part of Brazil—French Guiana is clearly the most isolated territory (Hoefte et al. 2017: 4). This isolation also becomes evident through the memoir of poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith (2015: 12) in which she recollects her adventurous honeymoon to French Guiana in 1981:

The only available route [from the United States] was a commercial flight to Miami, then a local airline to take us through Barbados, Grenada, and Haiti, finally disembarking in Suriname. We would have to find our way to a river town outside the capital city and once there hire a boat to cross the Maroni River into French Guiana.

The only flights that left the capital city Cayenne were Paris-bound, and the air connection to the metropole (a term still used by most of the people living in French overseas departments)² was still the most frequented air flight route to and from French Guiana at the time of my fieldwork. Due to its status as département d’outre-mer—which it obtained in 1946 together with Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean Sea and Réunion in the Indian Ocean (Murdoch 2008; Mam Lam Fouck 2007, 2013: 151–199)—Guyane is officially a fully fledged member of the French Republic from whose ‘centre’ it is geographically distant, but on which it is also economically dependent.³ Additionally, it is an integral part of the European Union, which terms some of its far-away colonial vestiges as Outermost Regions, subject to EU legislation: ‘Regardless of the great distance separating them from the European continent,’ a document of the European Parliament (2020: 2) reads, ‘the outermost regions are an integral part of the European Union, and the acquis communautaire is fully applicable in their territory’ (see also Boatcă 2018: 200).⁴ On the one hand, this status implies specific conditions of dependency and social exclusion for Guyane’s non-white majority that is trapped in a ‘colonial-style situation’ (Price 2018a: 18) and has become ‘relegated to the periphery of “Frenchness” ’ (Bancel et al. 2017b: 20). Recent critical ethnographic research has shown the racialisation at play in the context of access to housing for non-white, especially Maroon communities in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni at the border with Suriname (Léobal 2018a). In 2017, this racial injustice was part of the broader mass protests calling for social transformation in Guyane. On the other hand, despite massive discrimination in comparison to the metropole, Guyane has become an ‘€udorado’ for many migrants in Latin America and the Caribbean.⁵ Because of intersecting motives such as better financial prospects, security reasons, and political stability, French Guiana has witnessed a significant rate of immigration over the past decades. Today, more than one in three residents of French Guiana does not hold French citizenship. The vast majority of these migrants come from Haiti and the territory’s neighbours Suriname and Brazil (INSEE 2018). If all of those born outside of Guyane are counted (i.e. including people born in the metropole and in other French overseas territories), the number rises to well above 60%: ‘These new inhabitants,’ historian Mam Lam Fouck (2015: 72) shows, ‘represent 62.3% of the population aged 18 to 79 years: 42.8% were born abroad, 13.2% in the metropole and 6.2% in another DOM [département d’outre-mer] or COM [collectivité d’outre-mer].’⁶ Anthropologist Richard Price (2018a: 19) argues that this diversity sets French Guiana apart from other French Caribbean departments, giving ‘its society an edgy feel that is absent in the more French-style (bourgeois) islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Much greater inequality of wealth, many more non-French speakers, more crime and tremendous unemployment make Guyane feel Third World.’ In any case, its unique status as continental Outermost Region in South America complicates the territory’s integration in regional networks such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), or the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) (Hoefte et al. 2015; Bishop et al. 2017).⁷

The Brazilian state of Amapá, for its part, is also quite alienated from the rest of its nation-state and only became an internationally recognised part of Brazil in 1900. It comprises the territory of the formerly contested territory (Contestado franco-brasileiro/Contesté franco-brésilien) which was incorporated into the state of Pará in 1900 (Granger 2011). It took almost a half-century for Amapá to be turned into Território Federal do Amapá in 1943, before finally achieving statehood in 1988. In was also in the 1980s that Amapá began to demarcate several terras indígenas (indigenous territories), of which the municipality of Oiapoque has a particularly high proportion: 23% of the municipality is covered by protected indigenous lands (Figueiredo 2017).⁸ Lacking road connections to other Brazilian states, Amapá can only be reached from the rest of the country (and vice versa) by maritime transport and air travel. Using the example of Amapá’s hard-to-reach small town of Igarapé Guariba, anthropologist Hugh Raffles’s fieldwork in Ama-zonia critically reflects on the widespread, degrading assumption of this region’s purported ‘backwardness’ (Raffles 1999). With reference to Oiapoque’s motto Aqui começa o Brasil (Brazil begins here), historian Carlo Romani (2013: 169) stresses the plight and abandonment of the town by claiming that it ‘was treated [by the state] much more like a place where Brazil ended than as a place where Brazil began.’ In this sense, albeit not being located on another continent than the rest of the nation-state (as in the case of Guyane ...